Metis entertainer shares his songs and stories

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Students at Yorkdale Central school in Yorkton were taken on a rollicking ride through Canadian history on Oct. 10, thanks to Buffalo Tales, a presentation by Ted Longbottom and Dan Koulack.

Longbottom is a Metis singer, songwriter and storyteller from Selkirk, Man. Koulack is a musician from New York who not only provides musical accompaniment, but also dons costumes to help Longbottom bring his stories to life.

The students responded immediately to Longbottom and Koulack's music, swaying, clapping and tapping in time.

The 45-minute show focuses on the days of the fur traders and incorporates Metis fiddle music along with powwow, jazz and world music.

Longbottom, whose heritage includes Ojibway, Cree and English, grew up on an Ojibway reserve. As a child, he was fascinated by the fiddlers in the community. He'd watch them for hours, trying to see what finger movements created the music.

During his performance, Longbottom sings and tells stories in both Ojibway and English and plays Aboriginal instruments including an Iroquois courting flute.

"I do songs about our history here in Canada. I do a lot of songs about fur traders and the voyageurs," Longbottom told the students as he opened the show.

The show makes this historical study lively and fun. Longbottom begins by explaining how the Hudson's Bay Company sent its people out into the wilds to meet and trade with the Aboriginal inhabitants.

Boats crewed by 12 to 20 men would take "just about everything you would find in a store then," he said. "They would travel Canada, looking for Aboriginal people to trade with."

Koulack put on a costume and Longbottom introduced him to the audience as voyageur Gordie Ross, then explained some of what his life would have been like.

The voyageurs didn't have ways to calculate distance travelled so they had other ways to measure, Longbottom told his young audience. Many of the voyageurs would smoke a pipe during breaks. That led to their describing a journey's length by the number of pipe-fulls of tobacco they smoked.

Longbottom told of how the voyageurs took along buffalo pemmican on their journeys, a food that would last many years. That way they didn't have to stop and fish or hunt for food. "All he had to do was to reach into his pemmican pack, pull it out and eat it."

He explained that Ross wore a puffy shirt because it was cool and a wide woven belt that had a greater role than decoration or keeping his pants up. The fur traders would tighten the belts like weight lifting belts. That would support their backs when they lifted their heavy loads of goods, he told the children.

The lesson concluded with the two performing The Ballad of Gordie Ross. "My father was a fur trading man. I was born in 1843. My mother was a country wife, a woman of the Cree," Longbottom sang.

As Longbottom went on to explain that the Aboriginal people had been living in the country for thousands of years, a slide show displayed photographs of Aboriginal people. "I'm an Aboriginal person. I'm a Metis person. That means I'm a person of mixed descent," he said.

Ted Longbottom told the students Metis just means mix and that the Metis were born out of the relationships of the fur traders and Aboriginal women. Their Aboriginal wives made it possible for the fur traders to survive in the cold, to find food and to evade danger. The cultures of the couple mixed.

As Koulack pulled on a buffalo costume and wandered in front of the audience, Longbottom told the students of the important role the animal had played in the lives of Aboriginal people. He described how the buffalo used to cover the plains and how it could take days of waiting for a herd to pass by. He talked about the hunt, of how the hunters would stampede a herd and then go among them shooting. When a hunter downed a buffalo he would throw a rock wrapped in fabric beside it.

"His wife and family would come along and see that it was his buffalo," he said. "She would make pemmican."

The Yorkton performance was just one of 41 school shows Longbottom and Koulack did across Saskatchewan in October and November. The performances of Buffalo Tales were sponsored by the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts as part of its Fall 2006 junior concerts tour.